Osama’s killing: Pak military’s lame explanations find no takers

Islamabad, May 3(ANI): The Pakistan military has been struggling to explain the role it played in the killing of elusive Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who was shot dead Sunday night in a top secret operation involving a small team of US Special Forces in Abbottabad city, located 50 kilometres northeast of Islamabad.

In a damage control exercise, the Pakistan military tried to find refuge in ‘intelligence failure’ as bin Laden was killed in a CIA-led helicopter borne raid on a house right under the nose of Pakistan military’s training academy.

“We had been looking for him in no-go areas, unaware that he was living so close to an installation of ours. Yes, it is an intelligence failure,” the Dawn quoted a senior military official, as saying in a background session on bin Laden’s death.

However, even as military officials tried to downplay bin Laden’s killing in a compound less than a kilometre away from Kakul academy, they found very few takers for their explanation.

It is hard to believe that the paranoid security agencies never conducted a reconnaissance of the vicinity of their main training facility during times when military installations faced a continuous threat of terrorist attacks.

Odder still is the fact that the military authorities or the intelligence sleuths never felt the need to find out who was using a heavily guarded structure, which was protected by barded wires and fortified walls and had the extra precaution of surveillance cameras.

In fact, it is tragically comical that this compound was at a stone’s throw from where Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani had attended a parade around a week ago, and had said publicly that his soldiers had broken the back of militants.

However, it is not just the denial of the Pakistan army of any prior knowledge of the operation that is raising eyebrows.

Another anomaly in the Pakistan military’s account of the raid is their explanation of how four US helicopters evaded the country’s air defence system for about an hour (almost 30 minutes each side) as they flew in from Bagram and returned after a 40-minute long foray.

One official claimed that the helicopters succeeded in avoiding detection through ‘Nap of the earth flight’- a military tactic involving low-altitude flying to evade air defence systems. Yet another official maintained that the air defence systems had been jammed by the Americans. (ANI)